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Protospiel Ann Arbor 2017

Protospiel Ann Arbor, the testing event that launched a thousand other testing events, is an easy stop on the annual circuit for me, (though I sometimes end up missing the anniversary party for one of my favorite Colorado breweries 😟), since I can combine with a visit to my hometown and the fam.

I’ve written about it before (maybethrice), and got in a great set of tests this year as well — I got Valour tested, got a not-yet-public project I’m working on with Josh Sprung beat to hell, and got my new card drafting/bluffing game Potemkin Empire to the table twice: the second test was a great opportunity to shore up some issues that presented strongly in the first test. Fixed a runaway leader problem, and doubled down on the parts of the game players said were the most fun.

It really feels like Valour is rounding a final corner; the game only overstayed it’s welcome by one single Gaul turn this time, and a two hour playtest (Yay! Hit my target duration!) prompted a full hour of discussion among the players. Felt really good.

Josh and I also got some good news about an externality we were waiting on for our not-yet-public project, which I’ll either be talking about soon, or continuing not to talk about… So cloak & dagger🕵️🗡!

Now that we’re over a hundred words into this post, what I really wanted to discuss was the Protospiel “Karma” system, which, as you might imagine from a gathering of game designers, is a set of casual game mechanics governing how the event itself run. How meta!

The crux of the system (the primary resource, if you will…) is time; The economy of time is how it’s spent on your designs, and how your time is spent on others’ designs. Since that’s zero-sum on its own, there’s a little bit of give in the system, and it’s overall purpose is to prevent people from being total moochers, rather than landing in an exactly perfect balance by the end of the weekend.

An all-truthful build strategy in Potemkin Empire v2 is no match for a wildly imbalanced protection mechanic.

If you test a one hour, five player game first thing in the morning, (a total of five person-hours) you ought to sit in on other players’ games for the next five hours. Pretty rad system. And if you’re doing the math on above and wondering how I possibly got all that in in a three-day event, and still came anywhere close to achieving a karmic balance, a secondary part of designer registration is that you can bring along free “tester” attendees — one day my dad came by to check it out, and play a few games, so his time in-game helps push the needle to balance out my scale.

It’s pretty cool, and seems quite equitable if everyone is honoring the rules. I’m working on gathering a critical mass of designers for a playtesting ring in Boulder, and if I get a group together, I’ll definitely be using a system like this to keep it fair.